Norwegian and Danish are really similar, so we can typically communicate without too much trouble, but there are a few things here and there that can cause confusion, such as the use of modal verbs.

In Norwegian, "må" means "must/have to", while in Danish it basically means "be allowed to". This can make a sentence mean "May I join you?" or "Do I have to join you?" depending on the language, which can be kind of confusing in danish-norwegian conversations. I'm not actually sure if most Danes are aware of this (normally, Norwegians know more about Danish and Swedish than the other way around), so I always use the Danish version when in Denmark.

Similarily, "skal" means "will/shall" in Norwegian and "must" in Danish.

Then of course there are a lot of other common words with different meanings, such as "tøs" being a neutral word meaning girl in Danish and being something close to slut in Norwegian (although it's not really used anymore).

Quite a lot of words borrowed into Japanese from other languages have evolved, or been appropriated for, new meanings, producing false friends.

A few off the top of my head:

German arbeit (sp?) becomes アルバイト <arubaito>, meaning part-time or casual work (only)Rinse -> リンス <rinsu>: (hair) conditionerOne-piece (swimsuit) -> ワンピース <wan pi-su>: a dress (i.e. as opposed to a skirt and blouse)Mansion -> マンション <manshon>: a condo (although I believe this is used this way in the UK, from watching Rumpole)Stove -> ストーブ <suto-bu>: heater, not used for a cooking stoveCider -> サイダー <saida->: fizzy pop, specifically what I, as an Australian, would call lemonadeDiet -> ダイエット <daietto>: only used in the sense of attempting to lose weight, not as 'food eaten by a person/people'Half -> ハーフ <ha-fu>: A person of mixed Japanese and non-Japanese (specifically Caucasian or African) descent. From 'half-blood' or 'half-caste' originally, and retaining those meanings without any of the other possible meanings of 'half, and Arguably also without the negative connotations.Portuguese capa (cape) -> 合羽 <kappa>: raincoat

Also, one similar one in reverse:The Japanese word 'sake' (酒) means alcoholic beverages in general, not just Japanese Rice Wine (Nihonshu, 日本酒), although it has exclusively the specific meaning in English.

It is expected to have false friends among related languages. I was amazed at the amount I found at False Friends of the Slavist. I knew some of these, but even for those I knew I found they had even more different meanings than I thought.

English "smell" is very close in sound to the danish "smæld" which means crack (sound) or lash (action) - but isn't onomatopoeic. The danish word "piskesmæld" thus means "whiplash" (as in the injury to the neck).

There's a very large number of both true and false friends in danish/norwegian and english, particularly in the north of England. The Broad Yorkshire dialect of West Riding is documented in a small booklet written by my father-in-law and he cleverly authored it exclusively in the dialect it describes.

Given that hedges function pretty well as fences, I suspect those are closely related cognates.

and to make matters worse it sound similar to a English swear word

Which word? "Heck" isn't a swear word. In fact, it's what people who consider "hell" a swear word say *instead* of "hell" in order to avoid swearing.

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Eugo wrote:It is expected to have false friends among related languages. I was amazed at the amount I found at False Friends of the Slavist. I knew some of these, but even for those I knew I found they had even more different meanings than I thought.

Those are great!I speak some Russian, and on a recent trip to Serbia I was able to puzzle out the meanings of a lot of signs, and figured out the meanings of words from bilingual ones.живот (life in Serbian, stomach in Russian) and завод (institute in Serbian, factory in Russian) were entertaining.

My favourite I've found so far on that website is that the neutral and insulting words for Jew are switched between Polish and Russian...

EDIT- or that kvass (a common drink in Russia) is the Polish for "acid"!

Oh, I always get super confused when people say "canine" in English and thinks they talk about rabbits, sound pretty weird... But that's just one of few examples of false friends in English/Swedish. For example, we have the word "fack", pronounced as "fuck". I can't really translate it exactly, but before it was often used for shipping addresses. So basically it would sound like"Send it to fuck 132 48". Now, with so much international contacts, these addresses has been changed to be "box 132 48" instead, which sound much better... Also, there's the famous story of the swedish cashier who asked a foreign customer (who was buying cigarettes or something) to "Please show your leg". Of course she didn't want him to show his leg, but rather his id (leg being short for legitimation). Also it's worth mentioning that bra in means good, though most swedes are aware that's not what it means in English.As for false friends within the language, just like in German we have the sex/six confusion, only with the difference that here it's both spelled and pronounced completely identically (sex/sex). Then there's the word sats which have pretty many meanings, among them both "cum" and "theorem". So things like "Pythagoras sats" sounds a bit weird. But you're kind of used to it as you hear stuff like "I have sex" when a student is asked for what answer (s)he got on a math problem (I don't know about English but here it's pretty common to say that you have an answer). I mean, nobody would even react to you saying that.

I'm pretty sure there's more of these, actually we got a whole sheet of these kind of words in English class some weeks ago, will try to find it and post some more of them here

There are a lot of false cognates in Russian. Many years ago, in one of my Russian courses, a student was describing some architecture and was trying to describe a minaret that was part of the building he was describing. Well, he used his hand and made a motion up and down and described it as a minet (минет). Минет means BJ in Russian. The teacher (a 65 year old Russian woman) almost fainted!

The other false cognate that I've come across was Pollutsiya (поллюция). The guy tried to say that there was a lot of pollution in the Ocean and mistakenly stated that there was a lot of semen in the ocean. Of course, the Navy was nowhere nearby.

Our bilingual family has collected a whole Excel spreadsheet full of German-English ones. The most famous is 'Gift' (poison). Some others that have identical spelling and pronunciation in both languages:

"Hose" for trousers isn't actually that different from the English usage as in hosiery. It's only the more common garden hose sense that makes it seem otherwise.

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Given that hedges function pretty well as fences, I suspect those are closely related cognates.

and to make matters worse it sound similar to a English swear word

Which word? "Heck" isn't a swear word. In fact, it's what people who consider "hell" a swear word say *instead* of "hell" in order to avoid swearing.

Matter of definition I guess. If you say heck but mean hell, everyone will know you were thinking heck, and will think it themselves, so, in my opinion it's pretty much the same. Then again, I am strange

Given that hedges function pretty well as fences, I suspect those are closely related cognates.

and to make matters worse it sound similar to a English swear word

Which word? "Heck" isn't a swear word. In fact, it's what people who consider "hell" a swear word say *instead* of "hell" in order to avoid swearing.

Matter of definition I guess. If you say heck but mean hell, everyone will know you were thinking heck, and will think it themselves, so, in my opinion it's pretty much the same. Then again, I am strange

You are indeed strange, as by your logic all euphemisms are pretty much the same as every other word for their referents. So "use the restroom" is for all intents and purposes the same as "take a big smelly shit".

And yet, pretty much any other speaker would acknowledge a rather significant difference between "shoot" and "shit", "fudge" and "fuck", "baloney" and "bullshit", "gosh darnit" and "God damn it", and "heck" and "hell".

The important difference is not in what the words refer to, but in what their use says about your concern for propriety. We as a speech community have deemed some words as more taboo than others, and you communicate a wealth of nonverbal information by your choice of which ones to say or refrain from saying.

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I am not remotely offended when I hear people say "hell", but at the same time I would prefer a young child of mine not to say it.

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Given that hedges function pretty well as fences, I suspect those are closely related cognates.

and to make matters worse it sound similar to a English swear word

Which word? "Heck" isn't a swear word. In fact, it's what people who consider "hell" a swear word say *instead* of "hell" in order to avoid swearing.

Matter of definition I guess. If you say heck but mean hell, everyone will know you were thinking heck, and will think it themselves, so, in my opinion it's pretty much the same. Then again, I am strange

You are indeed strange, as by your logic all euphemisms are pretty much the same as every other word for their referents. So "use the restroom" is for all intents and purposes the same as "take a big smelly shit".

And yet, pretty much any other speaker would acknowledge a rather significant difference between "shoot" and "shit", "fudge" and "fuck", "baloney" and "bullshit", "gosh darnit" and "God damn it", and "heck" and "hell".

The important difference is not in what the words refer to, but in what their use says about your concern for propriety. We as a speech community have deemed some words as more taboo than others, and you communicate a wealth of nonverbal information by your choice of which ones to say or refrain from saying.

And you just managed to judge and criticise a stranger for not wanting to use cussowrds.

No, I judged and criticised a stranger for being wrong on the internet. Desire to use or avoid certain words never entered into it.

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I am not always right, on the Internet or anywhere else. And I fully expect to be contradicted when I am wrong. It should never result in hard feelings from either party.

Unless stated otherwise, I do not care whether a statement, by itself, constitutes a persuasive political argument. I care whether it's true.---If this post has math that doesn't work for you, use TeX the World for Firefox or Chrome